Core Option Studio: Unlikely Hybrids — Adaptive Reuse, Workforce Housing, and the Urban Bathhouse
This studio proposes the adaptive reuse of the Heinz Administration Building as an unlikely hybrid combining workforce housing with a civic urban bathhouse, framing adaptive reuse not only as a technical problem, but as an opportunity to rethink dwelling, civic life, and collective care in the post-industrial city.
Hybrid morphology of housing and Albert Kahn Drawing, MidJourney.
This studio proposes the adaptive reuse of the Heinz Administration Building as an unlikely hybrid combining workforce housing with a civic urban bathhouse. Through this transformation, students explore how architecture can mediate between living and labor, private and public life, and recovery and productivity within the post-industrial city. Leveraging strategies of adaptive reuse, sectional reconfiguration, and material intervention, the project asks how existing structures can be reimagined to address present-day housing needs, engage the river and its ecologies, and establish new civic rituals grounded in care, balance, and collective life.